Frying Spam and Other Things to do Before the Rapture
by Samuel Saint Thomas
Unpublished Exerpts
© 2009 | All Rights Reserved
Chapter Two
The Mennonite Furnace
An Excerpt
... That summer Mom said, “You’re not going to that school anymore.” She said the principal had a special school on the other side of town. But Dad said there was a bunch of colored kids that went there. “Hoodlums. You want him to go there?” he said. They talked about me as if I wasn’t in the room. Talked and prayed, all about what they were going to do with me, being at wits’ end, and at the end of their ropes. Late at night, when they thought I was upstairs in bed, I sat on the top step in the dark and listened. It was a serious situation. I was bad.
I reminded Mom of the time I’d won second place in the PTA Flower Show for an Army dump truck full of dirt and petunias. I carried it four blocks without losing any of the dirt, not even a flower. I even won an honorable mention ribbon at the science show for a clown with a battery-operated ping pong ball nose. I made a button to push and all. I had a red ribbon and a blue ribbon. But she didn’t hear me. She was crying. “I’m praying for a miracle,” she said.
Then one day she said, “Your father and I decided. You’re going to a Christian school. I found it in the phone book. It’s the last resort. They aren’t filled with the Holy Ghost, but they’re God fearing people.” She said they had two classrooms, and two seesaws just like at Craig Ridgeway, and it would be really good for me. Dad said they didn’t spare the rod or spoil the child there, either. I’d heard that in his sermons. That meant spankings. Spankings were for things like peeing on the church steps or throwing rocks at trucks. For lying and cursing, I got a piece of soap to suck on.
Parkesburg Mennonite School was a little gray building with miles of farms all the way around. There were two trees in the front, swings, seesaws, and a merry-go-round on the side. The outside, the inside, and all the kids smelled like cow poop. In class, the boys sat on the left, the girls on the right, with a big empty space in the middle. There were Bible verses all around on the walls. There were flies breeding in jars full of Lebanon bologna and there were sweet potato plants in the windows. At recess, the boys and girls didn’t even talk to each other.
The boys wore overalls. The girls, long dresses with bonnets on their heads. Mom said the girls made their own dresses out of special Mennonite cotton from a farm store where they sold pitch forks and manure shovels. It didn’t take Dad long to find the farmer store in Intercourse. He found it right near Blue Ball on the map. That’s where I got my first pair of orange high top barn shoes, my first farmer pants, flannel shirt, and suspenders.
All the kids laughed. I cried all the way to school for the first two weeks. They laughed at Dad’s Ford Crown Victoria. “Where’s your truck? they said. “You don’t even have a barn, do ya? You have cows? Can you pitch a bale? Canya sissy?” So I tried to be tough. So what if our car was shiny, we had music and dancing in our church. My dad healed deaf people and cripples and cast out demons. And I could speak in tongues. They’d never even heard of any of that stuff. I told them I had a bike, a scooter with brakes, a wagon, and six Tonka trucks. They said I was lying and they were gonna tell the teacher, Ms. Souder.
Ms. Souder had a twin. She taught the class on the other side of the wall. Everything about both of them was big. Their hands, their fingernails, their dresses, their hair, and their really big titties. Bigger than I’d ever seen. They were as tall as the doorway to the classroom and so wide that they walked sideways down the aisle to hand out papers. And both of them had mustaches and talked like men. They were scary. Why didn’t they shave?
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Chapter Nine
Fetch the Fowl
An Excerpt
... I could smell Mom’s Sunday dinner. I didn’t like the Woosleys’ food and they scared me. Dad said they weren’t quite right in the head. Sutheners, he called them. There were lots of them in the church. “They move up here and bring their ways with’em,” he said. Mom told Dad, “You know I don’t like it when Sammy goes there. You know they got the bugs again. They were scratchin’ all during church.” Dad stood with his hands in his pockets.
“Their fridge smells funny and their toys are broke,” I said.
“That house is filthy,” Mom said.
“Melvin’s a rapscallion. He needs Jesus. The Woosleys are good givers, pay their tithes every week,” Dad said, and headed to his office.
I knew that tone. It was the same tone he used when he read from the Bible, like God was talking. The discussion was finished and I had to obey. So Mom marched me off to my room to get some old clothes. Why did I have to wait to change my clothes at the Woosleys? Why did I have to always put my clothes in an Acme Supermarket paper bag? And why, why did I have to go to the Woosleys?
Into the back seat of the Woosleys’ dented old car I went, hugging my bag. Mom stood on the sidewalk, waving. Something smelled like a wet dog. I felt sick to my stomach. Jody was licking the window. Melvin was jumping up and down and pinching Jody. Sister Woosley climbed right over the front seat to hit him on the head with her purse. Whack. “You aint bein’ a good witness to the preacher’s boy, now are ya? Answer me.” Whack. “I said answer me boy, you no good for nothin’ piece-o-trash,” she said. Melvin laughed under his coat. Sister Woosley hit him some more on the head. Jody giggled and whispered in my ear. “I saw Melvin’s pee-pee,” she said.
Melvin’s place was down a long mud road back in the woods. Dad said it was a rundown log cabin. But I couldn’t see any logs. There was dirt where the lawn should have been. Whitewashed tires poked out of the weeds in front of the porch. The Woosleys had a cat with no tail, a three legged hound dog that could still run a coon up a tree, and chickens, lots of chickens, cackling and running in different directions.
All sorts of broken things were lying around in the woods — toy fire trucks, play ovens, cars, parts of cars, lawn chairs, kitchen chairs, pink plastic birds on long legs. Out back there were bikes with flat tires and no chains, and an old smashed up Plymouth station wagon. “Druunker n a skuunk one niight,” Brother Woosley said, “Wrecked it. Three in the mornin’. Ol lady got on ma God damn nerves. Day after? Got saved. Right there in the police station praise the Lord.”
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Chapter Ten
Lipstick Demons and Lucky Strikes
An Excerpt
... Dad was good at deliverance. People in the church lined up for it, down the middle aisle, across the back, and up the side to the altar to have their demons cast out. People came on school buses and on Greyhounds from Delaware and Maryland.
There were demons of sleep and demons of not being able to sleep. Demon stomach aches and demon toothaches. There were demons of homosexuality and fornication demons. Whiskey demons. Wine demons. Beer demons. Cigarette demons and cigar demons. There were divine healing preachers too. I’d seen all kinds at revivals and tent meetings. Dental healers, cripple healers, deaf healers, and healers for people with one leg shorter than the other. Healing preachers could even them out. Just like that.
But Dad liked deliverance, which was casting out people’s demons. He’d pray for any demon at all, but sins of the flesh demons were his specialty. Sins of the flesh demons were the kind that led straight to having sex. They stirred up lust. He preached about those more than all the other ones. They were important demons. “Wrecked more people’s lives than all the other demons put together,” he said. It was Dad’s church. He was going to pray for what God told him to.
Here’s how it worked. For a few weeks, Dad preached about the sins of the flesh. Sometimes there’d be a whole week of preaching about all the things people could go to hell for doing. It was either “weeping and wailing and smashing of teeth” or “milk and honey flowing on streets of gold.” My sister said “No, it’s gnashing of teeth, stupid.” But those were the choices. Heaven or a lake of fire. No one ever picked the fire. Dad said Catholics thought there was an in-between place, but since Jesus never said anything about a purgatory, it was false doctrine. And false doctrine was one of the demons. That made the Catholics demon-possessed, which made the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon. That’s how it was. Everyone had one evil spirit sent by the devil to torment them. Some people had a lot more. ...
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